Productivity Sauce

The cron tool lets you schedule system tasks, but if fiddling with cron's settings in a text editor is not your cup of tea, then the Gnome Schedule tool is right up your alley. Gnome Schedule is available in the software repositories of many popular Linux distros, so you can easily install it on your machine using your distro's package manager. On Ubuntu, you can do that by running the following command: sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule
To launch Gnome Schedule, run the gnome-schedule command in the terminal. To create a new task, press the New button in the main toolbar. Select the type of task you want to create. Most often, you would want to create a recurrent task that runs at...

Every now and then, I need to fill a blank OpenOffice.org Writer document with dummy text. While OpenOffice.org comes with a built-in feature that allows you to do that (type dt and press the F3 function key), it generates only one paragraph at a time and doesn't allow you to specify your own dummy text. So instead of the built-in dummy text feature, I used to use the Magenta Lorem Ipsum Generator extension that pulls dummy text from the lipsum.com Web site. It is, indeed, a nifty solution, but since it requires an Internet connection to do its magic, it's not of much use when I work off-line. So I wrote a simple macro that inserts dummy text into the current OpenOffice.org Writer...

The lack of a grammar checker is a pet peeve of many OpenOffice.org users. But there is a solution for those who are in desperate need of grammar checking capabilities in the productivity suite. The After the Deadline (AtD) extension adds a grammar checking feature based on the open source language checking server developed and maintained by Automattic (the company behind the popular WordPress software). The AtD server uses a combination of artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find writing errors and offer smart suggestions.
To make use of the AtD extension, you need OpenOffice.org 3.2 or later and Sun Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or higher. Installing the...

Switching to a lightweight graphical desktop environment is a great way to improve the overall performance of your system, especially if this system happens to be a notebook or netbook. But if you opt, for example, for LXDE, you'll discover that it lacks a graphical tool for managing power profiles and controlling the processor frequency. This might not be a big problem on a desktop machine, but the ability to adjust power settings is crucial for improving the battery life of your mobile companion. The cpufrequtils utility provides a neat solution to this problem. This utility can help you to tweak power management options from the command line. cpufrequtils is available in the software...

The humble nano text editor can be a rather handy distraction-free drafting tool, but now and then I need to look up words and their definitions in WordNet. To do that, I tweaked a simple Bash script I stumbled upon on the Stack Overflow Web site. The original script pulls data from the Google Define source, but it took just a few minutes to make it work with WordNet. So if you, like me, need to look up words and their definitions without leaving the terminal, here is a script that can help you with this: #!/bin/bash
echo "Enter your word:"
read word
/usr/bin/curl -s -A 'Mozilla/4.0' 'http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s='$word \
| html2text -ascii -nobs -style...

While the built-in browser on your Android device lets you bookmark interesting and useful links, you'd usually want to save them on a Web-based service rather than storing them on the mobile device. There are several utilities that can help you with that. InstaFetch, for example, lets you bookmark the currently viewed Web page on the Instapaper service, and there is a plethora of utilities that can bookmark pages on your Delicious account.But what if you want to push links directly from your Android device to a desktop browser? android2cloud is a nifty open source solution that allows you to do just that. Using it, you can push links from your Android device directly to the Google Chrome...

When it comes to filers and pilers, I firmly belong to the latter category. I do like to keep all my disparate data -- notes, links, to-dos, etc. -- in one application, so when I need to find something, I have to look in one place. That's why I wrote a simple Python command-line tool that acts as my personal data manager. While there are many open source applications out there that provide this type of functionality, none of them scratch my particular itches. So I wrote my dead-simple script that does pretty much anything I need. The first version of Pygmynote was released in August 2008, followed by a major update in January 2009. A few days ago, I released version 0.5.1 which fixes a...